nce and skill, he achieved the fine artistic results we see. He
did as much as can be done with natural clay materials, but the glory
of painted colour and glaze, like the later Persian or Chinese, was
not for him.

_Manufacture of Vases_.--The earliest Greek pottery is, like all
primitive pottery, hand-made. The introduction of the potter's wheel
into Greece was the subject of various ancient traditions, but we now
know that it can be easily traced by a study of the primitive pottery
of Crete, Cyprus or Troy. In Cyprus, for instance, the Bronze age
tombs of 2500-1500 B.C. contain only hand-made pottery, but in the
next period (1500-1000 B.C.) we find hand-made and coarse vases side
by side with a more developed kind of painted pottery--the
"Mycenaean"--obviously made on the wheel. It seems probable,
therefore, that the wheel was introduced into Greece about 1500 B.C.;
it was certainly known to Homer, as a familiar allusion shows (_Il._
xviii. 600). It was still a low circular table turned with the hand,
not the foot; representations of its use are seen on several vases of
the archaic period (fig. 16), and they further prove that the vase was
replaced on the wheel for the subsequent processes of painting,
polishing and adding separately modelled parts, as well as for the
original shaping or "throwing."

[Illustration: FIG. 16.--Votive tablet from Corinth; a potter applying
painted bands while the vessel revolves on the wheel.]

The method of shaping the vase on the wheel, which is the same as that
still in use, need not be described in detail; the feet, necks, mouths
and handles were modelled separately or shaped in moulds, and attached
while the clay was moist, as is also indicated on a vase. Large and
coarse vases, such as wine casks ([Greek: pithoi]), were always
modelled by hand on a kind of hooped mould ([Greek: kannabos]).

Parts of vases were modelled by hand at all periods by way of
decoration. Even in the geometrical period we find horses modelled in
the round on the covers of vases and later on handles enriched with
moulded figures of serpents twining round them. Such embellishments
are frequently, if not always, deliberate imitations of metal forms,
but the plastic principle is one which obtained in Greek pottery from
the very first, as for instance in the primitive pottery of Troy, in
which the vases are often modelled in human or ani